Biography

Michael Blake was born on July 5, 1945 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Dances with Wolves (1990), Winnetou and The One. He was married to Marianne Mortensen. He died on May 2, 2015 in Tucson, Arizona, USA.

Was homeless for a period in the mid-1980s while struggling to make it as a screenwriter and writing the novel Dances with Wolves. He lived out of his car and slept on friends' couches, eventually giving up on Hollywood and moving to Bisbee, Arizona. He was living there, working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, when the novel was published and his old friend Kevin Costner asked him to return to Los Angeles to write the screenplay, for which he later won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

After staying with Kevin Costner for several months, he wrote Dances with Wolves (1990), that he was reading to Costners' 3 year old daughter before moving out to Arizona.

Survived bouts with Hodgkin's disease in 1990 and 1992.

Characters do not come out of the thin air. I think writers acquire characters by living a life in which something is risked. It's only by being defeated, rejected, exalted, by going through all the peaks and valleys, that you can acquire anything worth writing down.